The Jackson Laboratory is teaming up with the UC Davis Cancer Center on a new biomedical research initiative that will allow researchers to extract a solid tumor from an individual cancer patient and implant it directly into a mouse model, letting them test the effectiveness of new therapies on it. And the research consortium is looking for other cancer centers to join it as well.
The Jackson Laboratory in Sacramento has developed a mouse with no immune system, making it particularly susceptible to tumor implants. And the new effort will help scientists advance work on developing more personalized cancer therapies.
"The standard way of trying to discover new therapies for cancer relies on use of tumor cell lines that may be many years old, grown in tissue culture and then put into mice," UC Davis Cancer Center Director Ralph DeVere White said in a news release. "While this has proven fairly successful in telling us what does not work, it does not predictably prove when therapies do work. "
"The biomedical research community needs a common, readily accessible recourse to support this vital effort," JAX Vice President and COO Chuck Hewett said. "Jackson has all the necessary skills and infrastructure need to create and distribute such a resource. No single cancer has a sufficiently broad patient population to meet this need, so we must work together if we hope to compress the drug discovery timeline and ultimately save lives."
- here's the story from the Sacramento Business Journal
- check out JAX's release